


Twice

by SpiralSpace



Series: Binary Star [1]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Gen, Good, So this is a weird AU, Teleportation Complication, but now I have 8000 words of it, corny Olde-Tymey writing, general identity angst, hey anyone here heard of the Ship Of Theseus, referenced self mutilation, show of hands?, so welcome in and make yourself at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 01:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiralSpace/pseuds/SpiralSpace
Summary: An AU with a lot more Glimmer in it. Starts roughly in the second half of season 1.





	Twice

“Come ooooon can’t you go any faster?!” Glimmer . The best friend squad’s shoes made urgent squeaking noises on the stairs.

“Uh, Glimmer?” Bow huffed. “Eclipses are cool and all but haven’t you seen the Eclipse Ceremony like a billion times? I thought you were tired of it.”

“Yeah but we said we’d be there and if we aren’t there aunt Casta will definitely make it a thing. You know what she’s like! She’ll make that one face and… auggggh! it’s probably starting already! Here,” she said, grabbing her best friends’ hands as they ran. “This is officially an emergency. I’m teleporting us.”

Glimmer teleported. There was a flash, accompanied by the smell of ozone. Glimmer’s ears rang with a noise that she could barely remember actually hearing. Her eyes told her that she was at the top of the stairwell, and that the room around her was slightly charred. “Whoa!” she heard Bow exclaim, somewhere down the stairs.

“Glimmer, are you okay?” Adora asked, also downstairs.

“Yeah, I’m fine!” Glimmer yelled down to them. “That could have gone better,” she muttered. Her knees felt very weak. Holding the guardrail, she started to tenderly work her way back down to her friends.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened!” she heard a stranger’s voice say.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bow said earnestly, his voice clearer now that Glimmer was closer. “I’m just glad you’re still in one piece.”

Glimmer focused on putting one foot in front of the other. That hiccup had really done a number on her. Her vision swam a little as she struggled to pay attention to the landing beneath her. She could tell without checking that her powers would be completely shot until she got back to the Moonstone.

“I haven’t had a hiccup that bad in a while,” the stranger said weakly.

Adora snorted. “A hiccup? Is that what you call it?”

“Be glad you’ve never seen her burp,” Bow replied, which only made Adora laugh harder.

Glimmer finally made her way to the bottom. She looked up blearily. The room was suddenly dead quiet. Bow and Adora were there. They both looking a bit singed and ruffled, as did the other person in the room. This third person was short, wearing a plum sleeveless leotard with a shimmering two-tailed cape. Their hair was light pink, and it sparkled. It flared out to the sides almost like a pair of wings.

**“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”** the Glimmers screamed.

-

“I’ve run some tests,” Castaspella said nervously.

“And?!” Adora asked. She fidgeted in one of the clinic’s flimsy chairs. “Which one is the real Glimmer?”

“I am! No, I am, she’s the imposter! Oh my god, I can’t believe I actually sound like that, why did nobody tell me, aaaaaargh this is the worst!” The Glimmers punched the soft cushion of the examination bench in synchronous frustration.

Castaspella looked almost on the edge of panic. “For all I know, neither of them is!”

They all gasped.

“What?! You mean the real Glimmer is somewhere else? And both of these Glimmers are both just part of some Horde trick?”

Castaspella’s eyes widened. “No, we don’t know that! Other than them not having any magic, every divination came back as I would have expected. However, none of my tests showed a single difference between them. As near as I can tell, they’re completely identical.”

“But how can that be?”

“Did you find anything in the archives about it?” Bow asked.

“Just one thing. I found a text fragment, believed to be from an original printing of one of the forbidden grimoires. I can’t make heads or tails of it, it was likely written shortly after the fall of First Ones civilization on Etheria. But some of these diagrams make it promising. Adora, could you take a look at it?” She passed the badly damaged paper fragment over to Adora.

Adora squinted over the paper. “Most of this is illegible, and what isn’t is… weird. But I’ll try.” She cleared her throat. “_And Once The Doppylgangner Hast Reeched The Eynde Of Ites Yousefellness,_” she intoned, voice stretching to accommodate the odd writing, “_Theye Shalle Meete And Battyl Unto Deathe, In Accordance Wyth The Olde Lawes, Thusly So The Sorceror May Dystynguish Hymself From The Imposter Throu Hys Myght…_”

Glimmer glared at herself.

“Nope! Nope, nope, nope we are not battling to the death!” Bow said, taking a moment to physically wedge himself in between the two where they sat on opposite ends of the clinic’s examination bench.

“Wow. That’s horrible,” Adora commented.

“And a bit sexist,” Glimmer muttered.

Castaspella shuddered. “The forbidden magics are all forbidden for very good reasons,” she said.

“So, what now?” Glimmer asked, voices tinged with worry.

Castaspella shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. There’s no spell for it, that’s for sure. At least not that the sorcerers know about.”

“I guess for the moment we’re just going to have to get used to there being two Glimmers…” Bow said.

“It’ll be quite a while before I can duplicate all your sweaters...”

The Glimmers looked at each other.

“You know what, I’m sure we can figure out a way to share.”

-

“WHAT IN THE-“ queen Angella stopped herself. She took a deep breath, and rubbed her forehead tiredly. “Tell me what happened,” she said simply.

“We were on Mystacor and we were late for the eclipse and-“

Angella cut them off. “STOP,” she said sternly. She pointed at the Glimmer on her right. “You first. What happened.”

“I was on Mystacor, I was in a hurry to get somewhere, I tried to teleport three people and I rushed it. It didn’t work, there was a small explosion and a weird smell instead. Then like a minute later this imposter walks down the stairs. We went to Castaspella and she says she can’t prove that she’s not me.”

“And you? What is your account?” She looked at the other Glimmer.

“The same, except that I did manage to teleport upstairs before exploding. I went back downstairs to find my friends and when I did, this CLONE was ~fraternizing~ with them.”

“Since when do I use the word fraternizing? You’re soooo obviously the clone!”

“Ooh you think it’s so convincing that you can say the same thing I’m saying. It’s just a party trick! And mom can see right through it.”

“Pffft.”

“Girls! There is one way to settle this. Follow me,” she commanded.

-

They stood before the Moonstone, sparkling still in the dark of the night, the air around them cold enough to bite. Glancing down over the dizzying edge of the platform made Glimmer realize she was still very tired.

“Well,” Angella said, her eyes hard. “Get to it.”

They took a breath and, as one, placed their hands on the runestone. Its glow expanded, enveloping each of them. Glimmer felt the strength return to her tired limbs as the power of the Moonstone flowed through her.

“That settles it,” the queen said.

“What?! No, mom, it’s me, can’t you tell? Why can’t you tell!?!?”

Angella got down on her knees and wrapped both of them in a big hug. “You can’t fool a runestone, Glimmer,” she said, so softly. “You are -both- my daughter.”

Glimmer spent a long time crying into her shoulder.

-

“No way the bed’s all one item. That’s three comforters, two blankets and five pillows. They can all go in different piles. And are we really going to split up Professor Hoot and Miss Foxie?”

“What? Why would you put -them- in separate piles?”

“I didn’t! You did!” Glimmer picked up the fox plushie and angrily placed it next to the owl plushie, on top of a pile of seemingly random furniture, clothes, and miscellaneous belongings. There was a large letter ‘c’ marked out in tape in front of the pile. There were four other piles next to it, likewise labelled ‘a’ through ‘e’. The rest of the room looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

Bow and Adora blearily rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. “Glimmer, what’s going on?” Bow asked.

The Glimmer closer to the door came over their way. “Oh hey guys! You know, just divvying up literally all of my possessions and giving half of them to an imposter in the name of keeping the peace, no biggie.” She laughed nervously. The other Glimmer glanced their way but kept fussing with a pile.

“You look tired,” Adora said. “Did you rest at all last night?”

“What, and let -her- strangle me in my sleep? No way! Speaking of, I know it’s a weird question but can I have your room? You could take this one instead.”

“Wait, so neither of you are staying here? Why?”

“The room’s too big to go in a pile.”

“So one of you is taking Adora’s room and the other is moving into the other guest bedroom? How are you deciding who goes where?” Bow asked.

“We don’t care,” she said. The other nodded, off to the side.

“So what’s the deal with the piles?” Adora asked.

“It took us all night but we’ve agreed upon a system. We’re dividing everything into five agreed-upon piles, based on the criteria of making each pile as evenly representative of different classes of items as possible, while doing as little harm to the value of each individual item as possible.”

“And then what, you’re going to auction for them?”

“Good idea but it wouldn’t work. We’d always bid the same amount at the same time. No, one of us is going to get to pick two piles and then the other takes the remaining three. But as for who’s going to be who, we’re probably going to have to get some form of outside arbitration for that. Gonna need it for a lot of things, actually. Are you guys free?”

“Yes, Glimmer, we’re free,” Bow said patiently. “There’s two of you and there wasn’t yesterday.”

“Great! We’ve got stuff to talk about. I hereby call the first summit of the best friend squad plus a clone hanger-on to order.”

“First item of business; when was the last time you ate something?” Bow asked.

The Glimmers both looked away guiltily.

-

“Mmm, sho wat’s dis one?” Adora asked, her mouth full of sandwich. Glimmer had refused to go out for brunch, so they’d scavenged a partially intact sandwich platter from an actual summit that had been held in Brightmoon the night before.

“Egg salad,” Glimmer said.

“I like it.”

“You’ve liked all of them,” Glimmer replied, rolling her eyes. She reached idly for the last ham sandwich, only to recoil quickly when her hand brushed against her hand.

“What, you don’t like sandwiches?”

“They’re the worst version of putting a thing between two other things,” one of them said. “They’re just so bleh,” the other added.

“We could go into town, do this at a café or something,” Bow suggested.

“That’s one of the things we need to talk about,” Glimmer said. “Mom and I have agreed that we should keep this whole ‘two Glimmers’ thing under wraps until it’s… resolved. Or at least as under wraps as we can. Around the castle is one thing, but when we go out in public, only one of us can be seen with you at a time. I don’t think we can really afford for one of us not to go on missions but we’ll just tell the alliance it’s a new spell I’ve learned or something.”

“So what, one of you’s going to be, like, a secret Glimmer?”

“That’s the thing we need help with. How do you think we should manage it?”

“Uhhh, you could take turns, but it would probably be really hard to keep track of everything?” Bow asked.

“Right, I’d be lucky if I didn’t cause a minor diplomatic incident in the first month.”

“You’re both a commander of the Rebellion and the princess of Bright Moon. What if one of you did commander things and the other did princess things?” Adora suggested.

“That could work. We’d both be keeping track of our own business, and if the commander gives her reports under a pseudonym we could work at the same time, might actually get twice as much done.”

“And who would be who?”

“I want to be Commander Glimmer!” Glimmer said simultaneously.

“We could flip a coin for it. Heads or tails?”

“Heads!”

Adora grimaced. “Probably should have seen that coming… Okey, Glimmer on my left is heads, Glimmer on my right is tails.” She flipped. It landed tails.

Heads Glimmer pulled at her hair. Other Glimmer just watched awkwardly. “Augh, just my luck! I’m going to have to spend so much time with mom now.”

“I mean, maybe you could flip again every few months?” Bow asked, concerned. “That wouldn’t be too hard to manage, probably.”

Glimmer sighed. “No, this is the option that's best for Bright Moon. I lost fair and square. Need to own up to it.”

There was a pause.

“So Glimmer?”

“Yeah, Bow?”

“What should we… call you?” he asked nervously.

Glimmer looked at him like he was the one who’d grown a second head. “Call me Glimmer,” they said.

“It’s just that…”

“It’s going to get really confusing,” Adora finished. “It already is really confusing. Could we call one of you Glimmer A and the other Glimmer B?”

Glimmer crossed her arms. “Only if I get to be Glimmer A.” The other Glimmer rolled her eyes. “Same,” she said.

Bow tapped his finger on his chin pensively. “You are objectively different from each other on one count. One of you was upstairs after the teleporting accident, and the other was downstairs. You could be Top Glimmer and Bottom Glimmer!”

Glimmer reddened. One of her looked away in embarrassment. “Nooo thank you.” “Hard pass.”

“What about Alpha Glimmer and Omega Glimmer?” Adora suggested.

“Look, I’m Glimmer! I shouldn’t have to be called something else because I’M GLIMMER.” The Glimmers frowned. “So I know it’s awkward but can you just call me Glimmer? I really need that right now.”

-

“Hey so, I’m very flattered that you decided to come to me with this, and let me just say it is a fascinating situation, absolutely FASCINATING, but I’m also confused. It just seems like this is maybe one you could have solved on your own?” Entrapta puttered about her workshop, until she eventually found her notepad. She sat down on her hair-chair.

“What do you mean?” Glimmer asked.

“Well assuming I’m understanding you correctly, and I might not be, there’s two Glitters, right? And you want there to be one? So that’s just basic subtraction, two minus one, just kill one Glitter and you’re already there.”

They jolted. “Kill a Glimmer?!”

“Yeah! Gotta admit, I’m preeeeetty jealous. Imagine how much I could learn by dissecting myself!”

“And you’d just be okay with somebody dissecting you?” Bow asked skeptically.

“Heck no, I’d HATE it! I’d have to figure out a way to kill me first…” Entrapta trailed off, clearly consumed with devising the devastatingly devious trap that would decisively defeat her own double.

“We’re not killing anyone!” a Glimmer interrupted. “Can’t you just like, find a way to fuse us back together? I’ve been thinking, what if I just teleported to the same place as myself? Could I undo the accident, maybe?”

Entrapta squinted. “And do you think that idea is completely wise?”

“I dunno! That’s why I haven’t done it yet! I wanted to know what you thought.”

“Well to be honest, Glitter, I have no idea how your teleporting powers work.” “And whose fault is that?” she whispered loudly to Bow, beside her. “So I don’t really know how doing that would work out. But that’s the great thing about science. We can find out!” She rummaged around in a pile of junk for a few moments, then handed a pair of parts to the two Glimmers. “You can teleport objects, right?”

“Yeah, sometimes...” “We’re getting better at it.”

“These two parts are basically identical, minus molecular wear and tear. Why don’t you try teleporting them to the same place?”

The Glimmers took the parts with them into an adjoining room. They returned a few minutes later, both looking slightly horrified. “Okay, definitely not,” they said. “But what about our thoughts?” one of them mused. “Could you like, take memories from one of us and then upload them into the other one?”

“I mean maybe, that sounds really cool actually! I’m guessing it’d be about a year or two to translate thought to an electronic file type, and then roughly a decade to figure out a way to put them back in the meat, but it sounds vaguely possible. You’d still have to knock off a Glitter once you were done though, wouldn’t you?”

The Glimmers stared at each other. They sighed.

-

Glimmer looked up at the black, cloudless sky, folding over Bright Moon like a blanket. Below; the runestone was shining brightly on its pedestal. She let her feet dangle over the roof’s edge.

She saw a flash reflected on the tiles. The colour of it was distinctly familiar.

“Oh, sorry!”

“Right, of course you’d know about the roof too.” Glimmer rolled her eyes, not that the other Glimmer could see it. It had really been ridiculously optimistic to go here of all places if what she wanted was an escape from her current predicament. Other Glimmer wasn’t moving, though. “Come on, sit down,” she added reluctantly.

“I can go! I mean if I were Glimmer, and I am pretty sure I am, I’d want me to leave…”

“And if I were Glimmer, and I’m pretty sure I am, I’d only come up here in the first place if I needed to stew. So you might as well stay, you’re already here.”

She sat down beside her. But instead of stewing, she opened her big mouth. “Remember when Bow used to practice by shooting arrows up on the roof all the time?”

“And we’d practice teleporting to get them back, yeah. That’s how we found it.” She smiled, despite herself. “The good old days.”

They passed a few minutes in silent reflection. Although on observation, the line between that and stewing does tend to become rather fuzzy as time passes.

The other Glimmer was the first to break that silence. “Back when we were with Aunt Casta, you were really ready to do the whole ‘fight to the death’ thing too, weren’t you?”

Glimmer looked at her, then back at the ground, so far below. “Yeah, I was. I was so, so ready. I mean, it’s not murder if it’s yourself, right? That’s… that’s…”

“That’s something else,” Other Glimmer finished awkwardly.

They went back to stewing, each scrying for answers they knew they weren’t going to find. The night was still dark. It seemed almost to press them together.

-

“You know, the one silver lining of all this,” Angella said, “is that we’re going to get to spend far more time together, aren’t we, Glimmer?”

Glimmer gazed longingly out the window. Glimmer was sparring with Adora and Bow in the courtyard outside. She looked like she was having fun. Glimmer, meanwhile, had barely even used her powers since she’d managed to purge herself of the Black Garnet’s malevolent influence. She kind of hadn’t expected to be rescued from the Fright Zone at all, actually. It wasn’t like Bright Moon really needed a second princess.

“Glimmer, are you there?” Angella asked, worried. She’d barely left Glimmer out of her sight since, unsurprisingly. The pile of scrolls she was retrieving from the archives was tall enough to obscure her vision.

“Yeah, mom.”

“So, what do you think we should do about the situation with the Kingdom of Snows?”

“Honestly? I kind of want to say screw ‘em. I think we need to take a hard line on the Kingdom of Snows, at least at first.”

“Language, Glimmer! But I’m inclined to agree with your attitude. We can’t let them claim more than their fair share of sway in the Alliance, just because they’re a large nation. We’ll have to be firm on that.”

“A biiiit hypocritical, coming from us,” Glimmer mumbled.

“What was that, Glimmer?”

“Oh, I was just thinking that the real problem is going to be resentment from the other Kingdoms. I mean, it’s great that only ONE terrorist attack was enough for them to recognize that neutrality wasn’t going to work out, but the other kingdoms have lost so much already. We’re going to upset people when we just let the Kingdom of Snows walk in twenty years late like nothing happened. And of course everybody knows we can’t afford NOT to have them in the Alliance, so it’s not like we can just show them the door either.”

“Very true. And there’s the more practical matter of princess Frosta’s age as well. If you believe you can manage it, please do, but are you really sure you can ‘take a hard line’ against a twelve year old, face to face? What if she starts crying?”

“I think that princess is probably a lot tougher than she looks, mom.”

-

This skirmish was the largest one yet. With the Whispering Woods gone, the Horde was free to attack the outlying settlements of Bright Moon whenever it wanted. Automated drone swarms, mostly, but sometimes full detachments. There’d been no time to summon the other princesses, though they were fighting alongside local forces. Commander Glimmer was deep in it, as usual. Teleporting in to where the battle was fiercest, and fearlessly laying into the enemy with her hands and feet.

Her style always struck Princess Glimmer as incredibly reckless. But maybe that was just a trick of perspective. Would she really seem just as rash herself, to an outside observer?

Glimmer was rattled by the boom of the Horde’s mobile artillery piece. Her heart skipped a beat when the shot narrowly flew over the heads of some poorly-spaced village militia. That thing was going to kill somebody if it wasn’t dealt with.

There was a boulder on the hillside near her. She placed both palms on the massive rock, and closed her eyes. It took a full thirty seconds of channeling, but when she released, the boulder disappeared in a veritable fountain of sparkles. It reappeared above the artillery, landing on it with a satisfying crunch she could hear even from her perch overlooking the rear of the battlefield. It had definitely tired her out but she -was- getting a lot better at moving objects, purely because she’d been practicing. She was fairly confident even Commander Glimmer couldn’t do that.

Glimmer swept her gaze across the battlefield. A pink flash here, another there. She saw Commander Glimmer squaring off against two drones, immobilizing both with strikes to their front legs. But to her side, a horde soldier was lining up a shot with their beam weapon. “Glimmer!” Glimmer yelled. She couldn’t see Bow or Adora, they must have been drawn elsewhere in the battle. The soldier fired. Glimmer crumpled to the ground. She teleported in, striking the soldier in the back of the head and disarming them, before running to her wounded double. Glimmer was bleeding profusely, from a head wound. “Get a medic!” she shouted, at a horrified rebel standing nearby. She heard a yell, and turned. Another Horde soldier was charging her, green-sparking stun stick in hand. She tossed sparkles in their face, then went into a sliding kick to take their legs out from under them, before grabbing the soldier’s head in her hands and slamming it into the earth a few times for good measure. The soldier lay unconscious in the dirt beside the two of them. “Are you okay?” she yelled, perhaps a bit foolishly.

“Looks like you were the real Glimmer all along,” Glimmer croaked weakly.

“No! I’m not!” Glimmer tried to staunch the flow of blood. “Hey, how about we make a deal!?!" she asked frantically. "If you survive, then you can be Glimmer A! Doesn't that sound good? All you have to do is stay with me!”

Glimmer was getting very lightheaded. She laughed, against her body’s wishes. The pain made her black out.

-

The first thing she saw was white everywhere. On the walls, the ceiling, the floors. Even the light from the window seemed impossibly bright. The second thing she saw was herself. Glimmer was staring at her intently. “What happened?” Glimmer asked her blearily.

“You were wounded in a battle outside Mistmarch. You’re in the hospital.”

“Oh. Where are Bow and Adora?”

“They left to get something to eat. You were out a long time. I’m sure they’ll be back soon though. You -are- their favourite.”

“No I’m not. Uuuuuuugh, my face hurts so much.” She felt weak enough that trying to move seemed like a bad idea, but she could feel the tight bandages swaddling her head. “How bad is it?”

Glimmer looked away. “Well, on the bright side is it’s going to be a lot easier for people to tell us apart now.”

Glimmer paled to match the sheets on the bed. “That bad, huh?”

Seeing her distress, Glimmer’s eyes widened. “No, it’s not! I was just messing with you, sorry. Probably won’t even leave that much of a scar.”

Glimmer laughed awkwardly. “So no cool eyepatch then?”

“You can get a cool eyepatch if you want, it’s just going to be on top of a perfectly functional eye.” Glimmer said matter-of-factly. She made a sly expression. “Although, it might not be too late. I know I saw an unattended scalpel around here somewhere.”

Glimmer rolled her unbandaged eye and shrugged, as best she could in the hospital bed. “Eh, sure, why not. Please be careful though, I’ve already lost a lot of blood today.”

“What? No way! If anyone here deserves a cool eyepatch it’s me. I did just save you, after all. Clearly I’m the more badass clone. So if I find that scalpel, I’m keeping it all to myself.”

Glimmer smiled. “Jerk.”


End file.
